A blog about life, design, paper arts, food and other ways that I create.

September 28, 2013

Soulful Fall Digital Collage Tutorial

Hello there! Hope that wherever you are today you are having a great day! I am in my new office space, (which I just love!) trying to get caught up on my blogging. I have a fun tutorial for you today on creating a painted fall collage, using my new Autumn Canvas backgrounds. I also have a little freebie for you so you can follow along.

First, open the Autumn Canvas background called nrj-autumncanvas8.jpg in Photoshop.

Next open the word strips and cut and paste them in whatever position you want to see them.

I found this beautiful heart-shaped leaf the other day and just fell in love with it. Isn't it amazing!? I HEART FALL! :))) (let's open it up and place it in our collage!)

I really like the way the leaf looks but I'd like it to be more orange. Let's add a color overlay....

Using the color picker tool (the one that looks like an eye-dropper), select the reddish color in the top left of the painted background.

Then create a new layer above the leaf layer and fill it with this color. Next, using Cmd+G (or Ctrl+G on PC) to create a clipping mask as shown. Use a Layer Blend of Soft Light and play with the Levels, until you are happy with the color.

There! Love that....it just brightens up the leaf and it also helps to balance the color a bit.

Now, let's get distressing! Open up the painting brushes that came in the folder.

Selecting a white color and the brush of your choice, create a New Layer above all the other layers in our collage. Open up your Brush window, and choose the following before we begin to paint...Size and Angle Jitter at 50% and we want the brush to flip on both it's X and Y axis.

Begin painting all around to "paint over" our collage piece. Don't worry, we are going to "wipe away" the paint in a bit!

Now, let's use the same brush, in black paint, on a Layer Mask, to wipe away the paint. When I collage in real life, I use a baby wipe to do this! :)

On the white paint layer, create Layer Mask (by clicking on the little tool on the bottom of the Layer palette that looks like a little camera).

When we paint with black on a white layer mask, we are "erasing" away bits of the paint....

Use the same brush settings as before (they should already be chosen, unless you switch brushes)... paint in black on the layer mask until you like the results. If you erase away too much of the white paint, don't worry. Use the X as you paint to switch back and forth between white and black paint. Again, remember BLACK=ERASES the white paint, showing our collage, WHITE= lets the white paint layer come through.

Work on this until it's beginning to look and feel like a real painted collage and you are happy with the results. This is what I came up with.

I think it looks good - but I wanted to put a bit of a drop shadow on the word strips and leaf layers to make it look more realistic.

Here it is... all finished!

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial. I'd love to see your creations, just email me at nrjanitz@mac.com

Hey! This post couldn't be written any better! Reading through this post reminds me of my good old room mate! He always kept talking about this. I will forward this post to him. Pretty sure he will have a good read. Thank you for sharing!